TREATMENT OF THE DEPRESSED CLASSES
Depressed Classes
Vivekanand used to call the Panchamas ‘suppressed classes.’ There is no doubt that Vivekanand’s is a more accurate adjective. We have suppressed them and have consequently become ourselves depressed. That we have become the ‘Pariahs of the Empire’ is, in Gokhale’s language, the retributive justice meted out to us by a just God. A correspondent indignantly asks me in a pathetic letter reproduced elsewhere, what I am doing for them. I have given the letter with the correspondent’s own heading. Should not we the Hindus wash our bloodstained hands before we ask the English to wash theirs? This is a proper question reasonably put. And if a member of a slave nation could deliver the suppressed classes from their slavery without freeing myself from my own, I would do so to day. But it is an impossible task. A slave has not the freedom even to do the right thing. It is a right for me to prohibit the importa-
